Cognitive rehabilitation is crucial for recovery after stroke. Therefore, here we provide you with some exercises for stroke patients , perfect for rehabilitation professionals to work with stroke victims.

14 NeuronUP Exercises for Stroke Patients

Depending on the sequelae of stroke, stroke patients will undergo cognitive rehabilitation or other therapies, something that will be always determined by a neuropsychologist or an occupational therapist.

To this end, we recommend 15 stroke rehab exercises designed by NeuronUP:

1. Objects, Places, and Professionals

This exercise helps stroke victims improve their spatial orientation. This activity involves connecting different objects to the places where they can be purchased and the professionals who work in these places.

2. Find the Monument

This exercise for stroke recovery aims at improving attention. It consists of following the directions as quickly as possible until reaching the monument. This activity targets processing speed, sustained attention, working memory, and planning.

3. Organize the Bookcase

This activity involves copying the position of the objects placed in the bookcase just like in the model. Copying them requires a great deal of concentration because the bookcase is in the mirror so the model must be copied in reverse order.

This exercise is designed for training sustained attention and selective attention, as well as hemineglect, spatial relations, and processing speed.

The model is on the right side and the bookcase is on the left. Would your stroke patients know how to organize it correctly?

4. Select Items from a Category

This stroke rehab exercise is ideal for improving selective attention and semantic memory. The activity involves selecting a number of specific items among a group of stimuli. In the next picture, for instance, patients must identify all the items that are food:

5. Picture Maze

In this exercise, patients recovering from a stroke must travel along a maze of figures to the target square while following various instructions. This activity trains selective attention and alternating attention.

Instructions:

Go from the starting point to the target,all the while alternating these instructions to move:

1. Move to marker
2. Move to round tip scissors

*You can’t move diagonally nor repeat the same squares.

6. Matching Words to Category

‘Matching Words to Category’ is other of the exercises for stroke patients. Patients must try to match words to the category to which they belong. This activity is aimed at training semantic memory.

7. Matching Cards

This activity consists of finding the matching pairs among the face-down cards. This exercise targets episodic memory, selective attention, and working memory.

8. Bottle Caps

This cognitive rehabilitation exercise involves arranging the moving bottle caps in ascending order. This activity is perfect for improving working memory, sustained attention, hemineglect, and inhibition.

9. Hangman

‘Hangman’ is a language learning game that consists of guessing an unknown word, one letter at a time. This activity targets vocabulary and working memory.

10. Task sequencing

The idea of this NeuronUP worksheet is simple: to order the steps necessary to perform an activity. This post-stroke rehabexercise improves cognitive functions such as planning, comprehension, and reasoning.

11. Obscured Objects

Stroke survivors must recognize partially obscured objects. This exercise targets visual gnosis and semantic memory.

12. Angles

This exercise invites patients to form the angle displayed in the model by using the given reference line. This activity helps stroke patients improve their spatial relations and hemineglect.

13. Emotion recognition

This is other of the exercises for stroke patients involves recognizing emotion from the depicted facial expressions and matching them to their definition. This is an ideal activity to improve social cognition, vocabulary, and reasoning.

14. Get Dressed

After a stroke, patients will find practicing this activity of daily livinguseful. Patients must dress a doll figure appropriately, by taking into account both the part of the body where each item of clothing goes and dressing in a sequential fashion, as well as selecting clothing appropriate to occasion. This activity focuses on procedural memory, body schema, ideational praxis, semantic memory, and planning.